Evelin Lindner, 2012 Emotion and Conflict: Why It Is Important to Understand How Emotions Affect Conflict and How Conflict Affects Emotions Evelin G. Lindner This is the long draft of this chapter for the third edition of The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Lindner, Evelin G. (2013). Emotion and Conflict: Why It Is Important to Understand How Emotions Affect Conflict and How Conflict Affects Emotions. In Deutsch, Morton, Coleman, Peter T., and Marcus, Eric C. (Eds.), The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. Third edition, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. The 2006 version of this chapter was later expanded into a book: Lindner, E. G. Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009. We have all experienced strong emotions related to conflict. Our emotions affect the conflicts in our lives, and conflicts, in turn, influence our emotions. This chapter begins with two brief examples—one international and one personal—to illustrate how emotion and conflict can interact. First, let us look at Adolf Hitler. Already during World War I, he was obsessed with bemoaning the weakness of Germany. But he was an isolated loner without any influence. It was only later that his obsessions began to resonate with the feelings of other people, particularly with die kleinen Leute, as they were called in Germany, or “the little people,” “the powerless.” He offered a grand narrative of national humiliation and invited “the little people” to join in and invest their personal grievances, including those they suffered due to general political and economic misery. “The little people” had occupied a distinctly subordinated position in Germany’s social hierarchy prior to Hitler’s rise. Nobody had ever deemed them worthy of particular attention. When he invited them, they rallied to Hitler’s narrative. It provided them with an unprecedented sense of importance. Hitler was greeted as a savior, a new kind of leader promising love and unprecedented significance instead of subordination and insignificance. Hitler was an expert on feelings. He evoked feelings of heroic resistance against national humiliation, convincing the German people that the true destiny of the Aryan race was to lead and save the world. Hitler wrote: “The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially…” (Hitler, in Mein Kampf, original work published in 1925-26 by Pimlico, London, p. 167). Like Hitler, also Lenin or Mao had discovered the soul of the masses as a resource to exploit.
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Evelin Lindner, 2012
Emotion and Conflict:
Why It Is Important to Understand How Emotions Affect Conflict
and How Conflict Affects Emotions
Evelin G. Lindner
This is the long draft of this chapter for the third edition of The Handbook of Conflict
Resolution:
Lindner, Evelin G. (2013). Emotion and Conflict: Why It Is Important to Understand
How Emotions Affect Conflict and How Conflict Affects Emotions. In Deutsch, Morton,
Coleman, Peter T., and Marcus, Eric C. (Eds.), The Handbook of Conflict Resolution:
Theory and Practice. Third edition, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
The 2006 version of this chapter was later expanded into a book:
Lindner, E. G. Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help
Us Wage Good Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009.
We have all experienced strong emotions related to conflict. Our emotions affect the
conflicts in our lives, and conflicts, in turn, influence our emotions.
This chapter begins with two brief examples—one international and one personal—to
illustrate how emotion and conflict can interact.
First, let us look at Adolf Hitler. Already during World War I, he was obsessed with
bemoaning the weakness of Germany. But he was an isolated loner without any
influence. It was only later that his obsessions began to resonate with the feelings of other
people, particularly with die kleinen Leute, as they were called in Germany, or “the little
people,” “the powerless.” He offered a grand narrative of national humiliation and invited
“the little people” to join in and invest their personal grievances, including those they
suffered due to general political and economic misery. “The little people” had occupied a
distinctly subordinated position in Germany’s social hierarchy prior to Hitler’s rise.
Nobody had ever deemed them worthy of particular attention. When he invited them,
they rallied to Hitler’s narrative. It provided them with an unprecedented sense of
importance. Hitler was greeted as a savior, a new kind of leader promising love and
unprecedented significance instead of subordination and insignificance.
Hitler was an expert on feelings. He evoked feelings of heroic resistance against
national humiliation, convincing the German people that the true destiny of the Aryan
race was to lead and save the world. Hitler wrote: “The people in their overwhelming
majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their
thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not
complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has
a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and
half that way, never partially…” (Hitler, in Mein Kampf, original work published in
1925-26 by Pimlico, London, p. 167). Like Hitler, also Lenin or Mao had discovered the
soul of the masses as a resource to exploit.
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Evelin Lindner, 2013
But not only had the masses followed Hitler. Friedrich Kellner kept a secret diary in
Nazi Germany from 1939-1945. It was published in 2011. He writes in 1941, secretly,
while living in Nazi Germany:
If we consider the present conditions, a feeling of sadness flows from the thought that
since 1933, the great majority of intellectual leaders, especially the university
professors, without any hesitation, dedicated themselves to the new political direction
and pushed aside everything they previously advocated and taught. Almost all gave up
their own will, their own thinking, and idolized, in a sycophantic, unprincipled way,
what had been prescribed to them by the party. What can you say, as a simple man,
about scholars and scientists who do not dare to speak up, even though they know
better? What will the rest of the world be thinking about a German science that is
corroded by (Nazi) politics? (p. 154, translated into English by Evelin Lindner).
Many Germans put such faith in Hitler that they followed him even when it became
evident that the situation was doomed. It required total defeat for many of his “lovers” to
painfully realize that their loyalty had been fatally misplaced. Their loyalty not only led
to millionfold homicide, it was even suicidal. Their own country, Germany, was bombed
to ashes. In other words, intense and highly emotional participation in a collective
obsession undercuts even the most basic rational and ethical considerations. Only Hitler
himself was satisfied, as he believed in „das Recht des Stärkeren“ (“might is right”).
Hitler said on November 27, 1941, to the Danish foreign minister Scavenius and the
Croat foreign minister Lorkowitsch: “I am also here ice cold. If the German people are no
longer strong enough and ready to sacrifice their own blood for their existence, then they
must disappear and be destroyed by another, stronger power… I will not shed a tear for
the German people” (translated by Lindner from the German original, Haffner, 1978, p.
139).
Now to a personal example. Imagine you are a social worker with a client named Eve.
She comes to you because she is depressed. She is severely and regularly beaten by her
husband, Adam. Neighbors describe scenes of shouting and crying and the bruise marks
on Eve’s body are only too obvious. You are afraid Eve may not survive the next beating
and you visit her as frequently as your schedule permits. You try to convince her to
protect herself. You implore her to leave her unsafe home and seek refuge in sheltered
housing, at least at times of crisis. In your mind, you define her as a victim and her
husband as a perpetrator. You explain to Eve that “domestic chastisement” has long been
outlawed. You suggest that Adam utterly humiliates her and that she ought to develop a
“healthy” anger as a first step toward collecting sufficient strength to change her life. To
you, the social worker, this situation represents a destructive conflict loaded with hot and
violent emotions and you wish to contribute to its constructive resolution.
Eve, however, stubbornly undermines your efforts and thwarts your dedicated and
well-intentioned attempts to help her. She argues along these lines: “Beating me is my
husband’s way of loving me! I am not a victim. I bring his anger on myself when I fail to
respect his authority! He saved me from a cruel father! My father never spoke of love and
care—Adam does!” And also Adam adamantly refuses to be labeled a “perpetrator.” He
accuses you of viciously disturbing the peace of his home and claiming that you violate
his male honor.
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Evelin Lindner, 2013
From Eve’s and Adam’s perspective, there is no destructive conflict, no suffering
victim, and no violent perpetrator. It is you, the social worker, the human rights defender,
the therapist, you, an uninvited third party, who violates the sovereignty of a home and
disturbs domestic peace by introducing conflict.
As we see, the definition of love and benevolence is crucial here. You define love as
the meeting of equal hearts and minds in mutual caring, a definition embedded in the
human rights ideal of equal dignity for all. Eve and her husband, on the other hand,
connect love with female subservience. They are right when they claim that it is you who
introduces conflict by drawing their attention to a new definition of love, one that stands
in opposition to the couple’s definition.
In both cases, that of Eve, and that of the “little people” of Germany, their loyalty was
intensified by their dominators giving them the feeling of being loved as human beings
endowed with feelings, rather than simply dominated like chattel. Martin Buber speaks
about I-Thou relationships, in contrast to I-It relationships. People hunger to be
approached as human beings and not as things. What these examples show is that the
promise of dignity, even if undelivered, is strong enough to elicit considerable loyalty—
and how it can be tragically instrumentalized and abused.
We can easily find more examples. Typically, neither the supposed “perpetrators” nor
their co-opted “victims,” initially, accept human rights framings of equal dignity. The
South African elites, for example, were defensive about apartheid—they felt it was
nature’s order itself that entitled them to superiority. Was not “white” worth more than
“black”? Was not the shade of your skin a kind of divine message that gave you a certain
position in a ranking order of worthiness? And did not black underlings lead a good life
under white patronage? Also many “victims” internalized this world view. The more a
ranking order was one of benevolent patronage rather than malevolent oppression—or at
least convincingly portrayed as such—the more outcomes were condoned that were
other- and even self-destructive.
So-called “honor-killings” have recently received increased attention, as has female
genital cutting. These practices have moved from the rather neutral category of “cultural
practices” to the accusatory category of “cultural violence” or “harmful traditional
practices.” Or, consider the Indian caste system, which has only very recently been
labeled “Indian Apartheid,” a new definition for a way of life that has endured for
thousands of years. Or, resistance is mounting against “war as the continuation of politics
by other means.” If not war altogether, at least the use of certain kinds of weapons in war
is being opposed. Campaigns have been mounted against personal landmines, and the
current increase in the employment of lethal unmanned combat air vehicles (drones) is
being criticized. Emotion researchers in particular will want to resist the introduction of
new “nonlethal weapons” that target emotions and thoughts. The Center for Cognitive
Liberties, based in California, USA, affirms “the right of each individual to think
independently and autonomously, to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and to
engage in multiple modes of thought” (www.cognitiveliberty.org). Always, we are likely
to meet perpetrators who feel thoroughly righteous and entitled, supported by
successfully co-opted victims.
In this conundrum, in which emotion and conflict are entangled in intricate ways,
questions arise such as: When and in what ways are emotions (feelings of suffering, pain
and rage, or love and caring) part of a “conflict” that calls for our attention? And when
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Evelin Lindner, 2013
are they not? Who decides? If perpetrator and victim agree that there is peace, who, as a
third party, has the right to call it conflict? And, why, after all, should conflict be all
negative? What about “waging good conflict”? Jean Baker Miller (1986), a pioneer in
women’s psychology, suggests that conflict is a necessary part of growth and change. She
stipulates that conflict is not the problem—the way we engage in conflict is.
What we learn is that emotion and conflict are not unfolding in a vacuum. They are
embedded into larger historical and cultural contexts. We live in transitional times where
growing global interdependence is connected with the human rights ideal of equal dignity
for all. Emotions and conflicts and their consequences—how we live them, how we
define them—are part of this transition. They, too, change as the world transforms.
THE NATURE OF EMOTIONS
What are emotions? Are emotions cultural or biological, or both? Are they nothing
more than constructs of folk knowledge? Or are they merely bodily responses, dictated by
hormones, skin conductance levels, and cerebral blood flows? Are there basic emotions?
Affects? Feelings? Thoughts? Why do we have them? What functions do they serve?
What about the so-called social emotions? What about the meta-emotions of how people
feel about feelings? Are there universal emotions across cultures? Are emotions rational?
Controllable? To which actions do emotions lead? Is there an automatic link between
emotion and action?
Interestingly, William James (1842-1910), one of the fathers of the field of psychology
as we know it today in the academic context, gave significant attention to research on
human emotion, while his immediate successors did so much less. Only a few visionary
scholars, such as Silvan Tomkins, Magda Arnold, Paul Ekman, Carroll Izard, Klaus
Scherer, and Nico Frijda, continued studying emotion. For a while, behaviorism and
cognitivism were “sexier” than looking at emotions—until behaviorism turned out to be
too narrow, as did cognitivism.
Today we know that feeling, thought, and behavior are closely connected. Feeling is
meaning (Opdahl, 2002) and belief “felt thinking” (Cromby, 2012). Interestingly, only
the term feeling —not emotion—is universal across cultures (Cromby, 2012). (This
chapter could therefore also be titled “Feeling and Conflict;” yet, “Emotion and Conflict”
is a suitable title as well, as “conflict evokes strong feelings which tend to be codified as
emotions as modelled by the Western theories of emotion,” commented Louise
Sundararajan in a personal communication, January 19, 2013.)
Indigenous psychologist Louise Sundararajan (2012) builds on John Cromby when she
conceptualizes three approaches to belief systems—emotion as meaning, cognition as
dialogue, and Susanne Langer’s (1953) aesthetic model of emotion/meaning (beyond the
stress and coping framework of Lazarus, 1966)—and connects them through the
semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.
These insights are not only important for psychology or health, but also for the field of
conflict studies. Political scientist Robert Jervis (2006) underscores how “over the past
decade or so, psychologists and political psychologists have come to see … that a sharp
separation between cognition and affect is impossible and that a person who embodied
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pure rationality, undisturbed by emotion, would be a monster if she were not an
impossibility” (p. 643).
Interest in learning about emotions, though resuscitated only very recently, is now
exploding and already rapidly changing, fueled (some would say, over-fueled) and
“legitimized,” not least, by new technologies. Research on mirror neurons, for instance,
underpins the recent emphasis on emotion, making headlines in mainstream publications
such as the New York Times: “Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment,
disgust and lust are based on a uniquely human mirror neuron system found in a part of
the brain called the insula” (“Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times, January 10,
2006).
Imaging techniques are being employed to examine the function and structure of the
neural circuits that support human emotion processing and emotion regulation. The
Program for Imaging and Cognitive Sciences at Columbia University in New York City
is but one example of similar projects emerging in many places. What is being researched
is crucially important for conflict studies: the neurocircuitry of emotional systems
(amygdala and basal ganglia) and control and regulatory systems (cingulate and pre-
frontal cortex).
In the beginning, until only a few years ago, researchers were intent on constructing
classifications categorizing the fundamental so-called basic emotions. Andrew Ortony
and Terence Turner (1990) give a tabular overview of some of the classification systems.
Today, the new cohort of researchers no longer endorses a single perspective on
emotion. They prefer multi-layered approaches that conceptualize elaborated emotions as
comprehensive packages of meanings, behaviors, social practices, and norms that
crystallize around primordial emotions. Jan Smedslund (1997) describes the psycho-logic
inherent in our dealings with emotions. James Averill (1997) discusses how emotional
experiences are “scripted.” The application of such scripts varies according to cultural
and historic influences. A rich overview of the new approaches to emotion research is to
be found, among many others, in David Yun Dai and Robert Sternberg (2004), Joseph
Forgas (2001), and Tracy Mayne and George Bonanno (2001). Journals that serve as
platforms for emotion research are, among others: Emotion, Emotion Review, Emotion,
Space and Society, International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion,
Consciousness and Emotion, Motivation and Emotion, Cognition and Emotion, Research
on Emotion in Organizations, and Frontiers in Emotion Science.
The exploding interest in emotions goes hand-in-hand with another major shift in the
field of psychology, namely away from regarding the individual as main unit of analysis
toward a more relational view. Just as behaviorism and cognitivism turned out to be too
narrow, so, too, Western psychology’s historical emphasis on individualism and separate,
independent, constructions of the “self” turned out to be too limited:
From its inception, the field of psychology attempted to emulate the “hard” science of
Newtonian physics that proclaimed the salience of material, separate objects (the atom
or molecule) secondarily coming into relationship. Ironically, Newtonian physics,
which has shaped much of the thinking in science and psychology, has been
challenged and replaced by modern physics, which emphasizes the primacy of
relationships (Jordan and Hartling, 2002, p. 50).
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Evelin Lindner, 2013
Emotions are the “wireless navigation system” for participating in relationships.
“Social connectedness is one of the most powerful determinants of our wellbeing”
(Putnam, 2000, p. 326) and “happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one’s
social connections” (p. 332). Mutually empathic and empowering relationships are key to
resilience in the face of hardships and stress (Linda Hartling, 2003). Individualistic
“separate-self” models of psychological development have endured in Western
psychology perhaps not least because these models serve a consumer economy that
thrives on a myth of self-sufficiency (Cushman, 1996).
An illustration of the ongoing interplay between relationships and emotions is being
offered, for example, by emerging research on the overlap between “social pain” and
“physical pain” processing systems in the brain (MacDonald and Jensen-Campbell,
2011). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Naomi Eisenberger and her
colleagues describe how the social pain of being excluded profoundly influences human
behavior—“social connection is a need as basic as air, water, or food and … like these
more basic needs, the absence of social connections causes pain. Indeed, we propose that
the pain of social separation or rejection may not be very different from some kinds of
physical pain” (Eisenberger, 2005, p. 110).
Another new trend in the study of emotion is the “humbling of Western psychology.”
Western psychology is merely one psychology among others, and indigenous
psychologies of emotion are gaining visibility now. (See, for instance, Averill and
Sundararajan, 2006; Sibia and Misra, 2011; and Dalal and Misra, 2012.)
All new approaches invalidate the old nature-versus-nurture debate. We are learning
that emotions are both “hardwired” and malleable, and adaptive to social and cultural
influences. Basic affects such as the fearful fight or flight reaction, or its opposite,
pleasurable approach, are only the bedrock on which elaborated emotions build. Our
primordial emotions are universal biologically based response systems that have enabled
humans to meet the problems of physical survival, reproduction, and group governance.
Culture, however, has loosened the link between those primordial emotions and their
functions. New solutions to old problems have emerged, as well as new uses for old
emotions.
Humans display the greatest variety of feelings and emotions of all species and this is
reflected in the complex web of connections between the more recently developed
prefrontal area and the older limbic structures of the brain. The historical evolution of the
brain and emotions is mirrored in each human being’s individual development. Ontogeny
(development of an individual organism) often recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a
particular species). Newborns process basic affects in lower brain structures. Emotions,
which are more recent in human evolution, become possible only when certain cognitive
milestones have been reached in the life of a child. In the second half of the second year
of life the cognitive capacity of objective self-awareness emerges, with accompanying
emotions such as embarrassment, empathy, and envy. Between two and three years of
age, the complex ability to evaluate one’s behavior according to an external or internal
standard emerges. Self-conscious evaluative emotions such as pride, shame, and guilt are
now possible. Schemas for emotions evolve to organize what we believe and how we
react to emotions. Finally, cognition and affect are forcefully intertwined in cultural
symbol and knowledge systems such as religions.
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The most immediate function provided to us by our emotional apparatus is to warn us.
Fear alerts us to potential danger or to potential benefit. We hear a noise. Is it a thief—or
just our favorite cat? The first brain structure to react is the amygdala, an almond-shaped
neurological structure in the lower cortical brain. This structure identifies shapes, sounds,
and other perceptual characteristics, sorting for threats and, very quickly and
automatically, responding with avoidance if necessary. It acts as a pre-attentive analyzer
of our environment and works without our conscious control, triggering fast and
automatic changes in tone and heart rate. Fear is a primary reaction that is processed via
adrenergic neurons (as opposed to dopaminergic neurons). Is it a thief? We jump up from
our chair, breathe heavily, and feel frightened. This system developed early in human
evolution and dominates our first years as children. In adults, stress brings it to the fore
again, often in unfortunate ways.
Let’s assume the noise proves to emanate from our favorite cat, back home from an
excursion! If a situation shows itself to be rewarding, rather than a threat, the amygdala
can relax, passing the data on to the basal ganglia to encode and store, awash in positive-
valence dopaminergic neurons. We get ready to approach the situation. We open our arms
to our purring pet. This simple daily stimulus response is aided by information from two
internal “library” structures (the left prefrontal cortex and a posterior area) from which
our brain draws stored abstract semantic and associative knowledge. All of this is
automatic. The brain runs largely on autopilot. We are not in control. Indeed, research
shows that our brain begins to unconsciously prepare our decisions several seconds
before they reach our awareness. The left hemisphere creates the illusion of a meaningful
script and a coherent self. It gives us explanations—and they may or may not be
trustworthy—for our behavior post-hoc. (The potential implications of this research for
free will, highly relevant for conflict studies, have been discussed at great length in the
literature, see, for instance, Roskies, 2010, or Gazzaniga, 2011.)
Our brain “wakes up” to controlled emotion processing when another, higher brain
structure, the anterior cingulate (ACC) signals discrepancy, uncertainty, errors, conflicts,
pain, or violations of expectations. The ACC tells us when something is wrong, when our
automatic responses do not work and we need to do something different. At that point,
two high cortical structures, the ventromedial frontal cortex (VMFC) and orbital frontal
cortex, weigh our current goals and the affective value of the situation we face. We need
these higher cortical structures particularly in conflict situations, because they empower
us to regulate and control our emotional responses. Here we learn and adapt, and generate
self-consciousness, abstraction, and imagination.
Findings support the view that emotions play a necessary role for the generation of
sound moral judgments. Indeed, the VMFC is crucial for appropriate judgments of right
and wrong—damage to the VMFC increases narrow “utilitarian” moral judgments
(Koenigs et al., 2007). Research on these processes, clearly, is highly relevant for conflict
studies. (“Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections” is the title of a relevant article by
Damásio, 2007.)
To come back to Eve facing Adam—or to global neighbors negotiating climate change
or nuclear disarmament—all participants’ brains loop through at least six brain structures
that deal with emotion, from lower to higher brain structures, from evolutionarily older to
more recent components, from stored memories of how we reacted as children to new
modes of responses that are open to us as adults. There are several distinctions and
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Evelin Lindner, 2013
dualities. Feelings can be hot or cold, they can have positive or negative valence, and
they can be automatic or controlled. Furthermore, there is the doer-watcher duality. The
duality of attention and processing is based on the fact that we can perform a task and at
the same time watch ourselves performing this task. Emotions can interfere in this duality
and disturb task focus and performance.
There is order and coherence in emotional processes, but that order can quickly
degenerate into chaos if we are unaware and insufficiently in control. Our behavior is
regulated by feedback loops that are organized hierarchically. Superordinate loops attend
to longer-term, abstract goals. Embedded within them are subordinate loops for short-
term tasks. We create or maintain unnecessary destructive conflict when we allow lower-
order mechanisms to supersede higher-order mechanisms. We invite failure when we
permit phylogenically more immediate and automated emotional processes to override
more abstracted regulatory processes. Long-term goals, such as the future of our children
and our planet, require that we use long-term mental tools.
The centrality of interpretation, meaning making as conversation, and the integration
of thinking and feeling are central to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–
1914). He posited that meaning making is a dynamic and dialectic interaction between
two opposing movements of thought—one near experience and the other more distant
from experience (Lee, 1997). The integration between sub-symbolic systems that are
closer to experience and symbolic systems that are more distant to experience (Bucci,
1997), can also be described as “vertical integration” between the limbic core of the brain
and its cortical systems (Tucker, 2007). The latter refers to the integration of thinking and
feeling through extensive “buffered” processing of related information across multiple
subsystems (Teasdale, 1999) or reflective responses (Cupchik, 2005), rather than direct
“mindless” or reactive processing. Integration of thinking and feeling can be objectively
measured by at least two language analysis programs, one based on the multiple code
theory of Bucci (2007) and the other based on the principles of Peircean semiotics
(Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count, SSWC, Sundararajan and Schubert, 2005,
Sundararajan and Kim, 2011).
In other words, there is an ongoing tension between older, more basic emotional
responses and our more recently achieved capabilities. To some extent, we manage to
resolve this tension through a series of hierarchically structured feedback loops. If we
succeed, emotions can be helpful and guide us well. Unfortunately, if we do not succeed,
this might lead to disaster. In turn, conflict situations themselves, with their increased
levels of stress, may cause us to override those loops and let older parts of the brain leap
into action. Learning to recognize and defuse this tension may be among the most
important skills an individual committed to healthy conflict transformation can achieve.
Emotions serve at least three functions. First, emotions monitor our inner world;
second, they track our relationships with the outer world; and third, they help us act. The
second function can cause us to make grave mistakes, because the outer world entails
both our ecological and social environments. Both can slide into opposition in disastrous
ways. As Jervis (2006) pointed out, beliefs not only serve our reality testing and
understanding of the world, but also our psychological and social needs to live with
ourselves and others. Our beliefs are feelings; they are lived and embodied meaning
(John Cromby, 2012). Our emotional desire for belonging and recognition may entice us
to bypass responsible reality testing and turn untested observations, reflections, and
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opinions into overly firm beliefs. One result may be that we create scenarios for
unnecessary, catastrophic conflicts, while leaving necessary conflicts unaddressed. Nicos
Poulantzas (1936-1979), a Greco-French political sociologist in Paris, was one of Pol
Pot’s teachers. Seeing what he had instigated, he later committed suicide (personal
communication with Kevin Clements, August 21, 2007). Pol Pot had turned Poulantzas’
academic reflections into rigid ideology, ruthlessly implementing it in his homeland,
Cambodia, and in that way creating immense unnecessary suffering. In the aftermath,
Cambodia’s necessary conflicts became even more complicated to approach.
Necessary conflicts that wait to be addressed in today’s world are challenges such as
global climate change and unsustainable economic models. One underlying obstacle is
the culture of ranked honor. To link back to Eve and Adam, the belief in honor norms can
be functional for “meeting the psychological and social needs to live with oneself and
others” as long as one is embedded into a community that subscribes to such norms.
However, honor scripts become inappropriate in human rights based contexts. More even,
human history has shown that narratives of honor have never been very functional with
regard to “reality testing.” Hitler’s allegiance to honor made him lose his connection with
reality. As for a more recent instance, also in the context of the 2003 Iraq war, important
facts were overlooked so as to maintain a socially desired narrative and rhetoric of
national honor. In general, the common good of all is undercut and sound reality testing
undermined when people forge strong emotional allegiances to cultural scripts that
suggest that “worthier beings” merit to have privileged access to resources and deserve to
preside over “lesser beings.” In human history, this arrangement has manifested by way
of direct force (meted out by the feudal lord, for example), but also indirectly, as via
“success” in accumulating monetary resources (within basic cultural structures that give
priority to profit maximization, Richards and Swanger, 2006). The results are
accordingly. There are more people in slave-like situations in the world today than when
slavery still was an official institution (21 million in 2012), inequality is on the rise, and
humankind would need several planets to continue its present overuse of resources.
Earlier, we discussed that emotions are hardwired and malleable. How can we imagine
the various levels playing together in daily life? There is the hardwired physiological
response and negative state of “feeling bad” and, at the psychological level, “this is bad
for me.” Parallel, there is the hardwired positive state of “feeling good” or “pleasure” and
“this is good for me.” As the “me” acquires social identity, these basic responses form the
nucleus for our more elaborated emotions toward other persons, groups, notions, or
ideologies. Rejection and enmity, as well as affection, attachment, loyalty, cooperation,
and other positive emotions are no longer automatic but context dependent. Very simple
examples show this. Spiders or worms are greeted as welcome delicacies in some
cultures, and in others with disgust. Or, for a vegetarian, eating meat is sickening, while it
is a joy for a non-vegetarian. Also the example of Eve and Adam shows how our
emotional reactions are embedded into broader historic transformations of normative
contexts. The term domestic chastisement expresses positive valence—the “man of the
house” has the right and duty to “chastise” his disobedient wife and children, and it is
regarded as “good” for all involved to be reminded of “their place.” Nowadays,
particularly in social contexts influenced by human rights values, this term has
transmuted into the negative concept of “domestic violence.” Similarly, in five hundred
years or so, the 21st century will perhaps be decried as a dark century of unsustainable
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social and ecological arrangements, against which human rights activists fought in vain.
In all cases, the same sequence of behavior that once was regarded as “good for
everybody,” is later deemed to be “bad for everybody.”
Neuroimaging may show Adam’s left anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices
being activated by his social dominance orientation (the preference for social hierarchy
over egalitarianism) and his lack of empathy (Chiao et al., 2009). However, such
orientations are not to be taken as fixed states. They are embedded into meta-emotions
that guide us in how we feel about feelings (Gottman et al., 1997). These meta-emotions
emerge within social contexts. Since it is human nature to be social and cultural, efforts to
create a new culture of dignity are not in vain.
It would be easy to overwhelm readers with an over-abundance of concepts and terms
at this point. Goals, attitudes, affects, feelings, emotions, emotional states, moods,
consciousness, self, psyche—the list of terms is endless and often scholars do not agree
on their definitions. For our purposes, it is sufficient to understand that we have to give
up any quest for rigid context-free classifications of complex elaborated emotions.
Elaborated emotions are multifaceted clusters embedded in culture and history.
THE INTERACTION BETWEEN EMOTION AND
CONFLICT
This section focuses on key emotions (negative and positive) such as fear, anger,
humiliation, guilt, hope, confidence and warmth, illustrating how they affect conflict and
are affected by conflict. It will be discussed what happens when we, during a conflict,
experience an emotion, let us say anger, and, as a consequence, try to make our opponent
feel emotions such as fear, guilt, or humiliation. Furthermore, the issue will be raised
what distinguishes a “normal” from a “pathological” version of an emotion and under
what circumstances an emotion may play a constructive or destructive role in conflict and
negotiation.
This section begins with the subject of fear, as a basic emotion processed in our “old”
brain. From there, we move on to more complex emotions.
Fear and How It Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict
The voice of intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is
ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of
shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all,
it is silenced by ignorance.
– Karl A. Menninger
Fear can make us avoid conflict (“flight”), or we might respond with aggression
(“fight”). Or, we might steer clear of either by embarking on productive negotiation and
reaching an agreement. Fear can hamper constructive conflict transformation when it fogs
our mind, or it can enhance it when it sharpens our senses and alerts our thoughts to
engage in higher-level regulation.
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As discussed earlier, fear is basic. Its seat in the brain is the amygdala region. Fear
warns us. It jolts us into alertness in a split second, sending stress hormones soaring,
making our vision narrower and more focused. Our old brain takes over to save us from
immediate danger. We may indeed gain short-term safety. However, there is a price to
pay.
In 1998, I interviewed Adam Bixi in Somaliland as part of my doctoral research. He
described growing up in the Somali semi-desert, learning as a very small boy to be
constantly alert, even at night, for dangerous animals and “enemies” from other clans. He
learned to be ready for fight or flight in a matter of seconds, at any time, day or night.
Continuous emergency preparedness meant that all other aspects of life had to wait.
Emergency trumped everything else. As a consequence, Bixi admitted, he felt he had not
lived life.
Modern managers often feel the same way. Continuous emergency alertness
diminishes our zest for life. It may even lead to cardiac failure. This is also valid for
societies. Cultures that idolize “lone hero” actionism (equivalent to the sympathetic
nervous system) and stigmatize maintenance and nurturing (equivalent to the
parasympathetic systems) invite social collapse. The reason is that the fact is overlooked
that sound maintenance is not optional; essentials are neglected that seem “menial” in the
face of emergency, but are vital for long-term survival. Investment in provident care and
nurture is as important at the individual as at the societal level. Therefore, Martha
Fineman is right when she laments, “Families bear the burdens of dependency, while
market institutions are free to operate as though the domestic tasks that reproduce the
society were some other institution’s responsibility” (Fineman, 2004, p. 203). By
invoking autonomy, “we create and perpetuate cultural and political practices that
stigmatize and punish those among us labeled dependent” (p. 31).
I was writing these lines while super storm Sandy roared outside of the window. This
storm once again exposed the dire state of infrastructure that results when a culture
idolizes heroic individual action here-and-now, but shies away from long-term
investment into the common good of all.
Earlier, we saw that feelings can be hot or cold and automatic or more controlled.
Joseph LeDoux (1996, 2002), a leading researcher on fear, describes how emotional
triggers can travel through the “high road” of cognitively cool assessment or the “low
road” of the hot system going directly to the amygdala. The cool “know” system is
cognitive, complex, contemplative, slow, strategic, integrated, coherent, and emotionally
rather balanced. It is the basis of self-regulation. Fear, as well as acute and chronic stress,
accentuates the hot “go” system, which represents a double-edged sword. While it may
save us from immediate danger because it is impulsive, it also tends to cause “tunnel
vision” and reduce the range of our perceptions, thoughts, and choices. It can undermine
attempts at calmer regulation, and finally produce overhasty reactiveness and suboptimal
decisions. Particularly in case of a complex conflict, fear easily operates malignly.
Fear and humiliation carry the potential to link up in particularly disastrous ways. In
Rwanda, fear of future humiliation, based on the experience of past humiliation, was used
as justification for genocide. In his speeches, Hitler peddled the fear of future humiliation
by the Weltjudentum, or world Jewry. The Holocaust was his horrific “solution.”
To conclude, we are well advised to cool down when we experience fear during a
conflict, in order to avoid disastrous tunnel vision and to be able to reap the potential
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advantage of fear, namely, enhanced alertness. Likewise, we should help our opponents
in conflicts to calm their fears. In negotiations, operating with threats—making others
afraid—may undermine constructive solutions rather than provide advantages. Present-
day politically polarizing talk media are doing society a disservice when they target both
the amygdala and insula regions in their aim to evoke fear and disgust for the sake of
profit and power preservation from drama (there is a close association of the amygdala,
insula, and the olfactory system, the amygdala being more likely activated during the
sensation of fear, while the insula activates more during the experience of disgust). It
would be more responsible to use the brain’s capacity for plasticity by speaking to those
brain structures that support cognitive openness.
Let us consider the example of Eve and Adam. At some point they seek counseling.
The counselor begins with reducing the level of threat and fear between them. Then she
attempts to transform fear into alertness and motivation for change. Adam is afraid to lose
power and Eve is afraid to be empowered. Addressed in a calm manner, these fears can
be translated into deep personal growth for both. However, this is possible only in an
atmosphere of warmth, firmness, and safety, an atmosphere of respect, love,
understanding, empathy, and patience, all of which the therapist strives to make available,
aided by their larger social support network.
Anger and Hatred, and How They Affect Conflict
and Are Affected by Conflict
Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain. Happily the